Scientists turn old plastic bottles into fuel

Millions of tons of plastic garbage pollute the world. What if they could be turned into fuel instead?

That’s the ambitious plan of a team of scientists from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC) in China.
The technique involves breaking down the plastic to a molecular level to turn it into a readily usable fuel similar to diesel.

The source material is the most common type of plastic, polyethylene, which is predicted to reach a global annual demand of nearly 100 million metric tons by 2018.